Meyerhold on Theatre

Front Cover
Bloomsbury Publishing, Jan 28, 2016 - Drama - 432 pages
Meyerhold on Theatre brings together in one volume Vsevolod Meyerhold's most significant writings and utterances, and covers his entire career as a director from 1902 to 1939. It contains a comprehensive selection from all published material, unabridged and translated from the original Russian, updated and supplemented with a critical commentary relating Meyerhold to his period and eye-witness accounts describing all his productions. The book is illustrated with photographs of Meyerhold's designs and productions.

Within this diverse collection of sometimes dense, sometimes lyrical, and always fascinating writings, Meyerhold emerges from this book as a forerunner of such directors as Brecht, Piscator, Planchon and Brook, a relentless enemy of naturalism and a supreme exponent of total theatre whose influence continues to be felt throughout the theatre of today.

This fourth edition features a new introduction by Prof. Jonathan Pitches, which helps to demystify some of the terminology Meyerhold and his associates used, and indicates the fundamental connection between culture and politics represented in his life and art.
 

Contents

Introduction
1
PART ONE THE SEARCH FOR NEW FORMS 19021907
19
1 The Naturalistic Theatre and the Theatre of Mood
27
2 The New Theatre Foreshadowed in Literature
39
3 The TheatreStudio
45
4 First Attempts at a Stylized Theatre
57
5 The Stylized Theatre
69
6 Notes on Productions
77
17 The Solitude of Stanislavsky
217
PART FIVE BIOMECHANICS CONSTRUCTIVISM ECCENTRISM CINEFICATION 19211925
223
18 Biomechanics
243
19 The Magnanimous Cuckold
255
20 Preacting
257
PART SIX THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR 1926
259
21 Observations on the Play
273
22 Meyerhold at Rehearsal
277

PART TWO AT THE IMPERIAL THEATRES 19081917
89
7 Tristan and Isolde
97
8 Dom Juan
121
9 Orpheus at the Marinsky Theatre
131
PART THREE DOCTOR DAPERTUTTO 19081917
133
10 The Fairground Booth
145
11 Notes on Productions
171
12 The Meyerhold Studio
179
PART FOUR OCTOBER IN THE THEATRE 19171921
191
13 On the Contemporary Theatre
205
14 Inaugural Speech to the Company of the RSFSR Theatre No 1
209
15 On the Staging of Verhaerens The Dawn
211
16 Speech at an Open Debate on The Dawn
215
PART SEVEN AN ALIEN THEATRE 19271940
291
23 The Reconstruction of the Theatre
317
24 The Lady of the Camellias
343
25 The Queen of Spades
347
26 A Reply to Criticism
361
27 At the Stanislavsky Opera
371
PART EIGHT THE CINEMA
375
28 The Picture of Dorian Gray
381
29 Chaplin and Chaplinism
389
Select Bibliography
403
Index
407
Copyright

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About the author (2016)

Edward Braun is Emeritus Professor of Drama at the University of Bristol. He edited the pioneering English-language selection from Meyerhold's writings, Meyerhold on Theatre, in 1969, and in 1979 published his major critical assessment, The Theatre of Meyerhold. His The Director & the Stage was first published in 1982.

Jonathan Pitches is Professor of Theatre and Performance and Director of Research in the School of Performance and Cultural Industries at Leeds University. He is the author and/or editor of four books, three of which relate to actor training and is the founding co-editor of the Routledge journal, Theatre Dance and Performance Training.

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